RFC 1713 (rfc1713) - Page 1 of 13

Tools for DNS debugging

Network Working Group                                           A. Romao
Request for Comments: 1713                                          FCCN
FYI: 27                                                    November 1994
Category: Informational


                        Tools for DNS debugging

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  This memo
   does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of
   this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   Although widely used (and most of the times unnoticed), DNS (Domain
   Name System) is too much overlooked, in the sense that people,
   especially administrators, tend to ignore possible anomalies as long
   as applications that need name-to-address mapping continue to work.
   This document presents some tools available for domain administrators
   to detect and correct those anomalies.

1. Introduction

   Today more than 3,800,000 computers are inter-connected in a global
   Internet [1], comprising several millions of end-users, able to reach
   any of those machines just by naming it.  This facility is possible
   thanks to the world widest distributed database, the Domain Name
   System, used to provide distributed applications various services,
   the most notable one being translating names into IP addresses and
   vice-versa.  This happens when you do an FTP or Telnet, when your
   gopher client follows a link to some remote server, when you click on
   a hypertext item and have to reach a server as defined by the URL,
   when you talk to t, when your mail has to be routed
   through a set to gateways before it reaches the final recipient, when
   you post an article to Usenet and want it propagated all over the
   world.  While these may be the most visible uses of DNS, a lot more
   applications rely on this system to operate, e.g., network security,
   monitoring and accounting tools, just to mention a few.

   DNS owes much of its success to its distributed administration.  Each
   component (called a zone, the same as a domain in most cases), is
   seen as an independent entity, being responsible for what happens
   inside its domain of authority, how and what information changes and
   for letting the tree grow downwards, creating new components.





Romao